Finding a Needle in a Haystack

We are past due to share some thoughts about Allocadia, our Illuminate Ventures portfolio company founded?by identical twin sisters?Kristine Steuart (CEO) and Katherine Berry (CPO), that merged with BrandMaker?(a Rubicon company) last week.

For those who may not know, Allocadia is an award-winning Marketing Planning, Budgeting, and Performance Management platform that enables marketers to plan strategically, invest with purpose, measure the performance of their activities, and ultimately maximize marketing’s impact on the business. BrandMaker, the acquirer, is a leading innovator in marketing operations and Marketing Resource Management (MRM) software solutions. The combined company will more deeply address the needs of CMOs and marketing teams. This is definitely a 1+1 = 3 combination.

Those are the facts, but we wanted to share a bit about our own back story of working with this exciting company. It’s not often that you can claim to have found a true needle in a haystack, but back in February of 2014, that is precisely what happened to us at Illuminate. One of our portfolio CEOs, Mark Organ (founder of Eloqua and Influitive), reached out to us about a talented woman founder/CEO who had launched a company in the MarTech space in Vancouver. Mark was aware of our interest in sales and marketing SaaS platforms (we were already investors in Xactly, BrightEdge, and others by that time) and our passion for creating a level playing field to enable more diversity in the tech sector. As he raved about the team and market opportunity, he explained that this company was a two-fer - it was a terrific company that also happened to be founded by a team of super-talented identical twin sisters. We jumped at the opportunity to meet the founders and quickly developed a bond with them and their team. Illuminate’s investment in this company was clearly meant to be. Less than two weeks later, one of our prior co-investors at Altos Ventures reached out to offer an introduction to a company they were considering for investment. Yes, it was Allocadia again.

There were many things to like about the company. The founders had deep domain expertise and were solving a difficult business problem that had broad applicability. While operating their prior venture together, a marketing services company, they had witnessed their customers struggling with a familiar marketing pain – managing multi-million-dollar budgets across multiple spreadsheets dispersed throughout the organization. As a result, their customers lacked visibility into marketing spend, couldn’t answer basic questions about forecasts or commitments, or communicate the ROI on their marketing expenditures. They knew there had to be a better way, so they created Allocadia. Additionally, the founders built the business in an impressively capital-efficient way, getting product in-market and reaching over $1M in revenue at the point we met - while having raised only $1M of seed capital. Their channel partnership with Marketo and nearly maniacal focus on customer satisfaction also resonated with us.

Despite an oversubscribed round, the founders made room for Illuminate to join the financing. As the company started as a services business, the founders valued the opportunity to gain access to our investing team’s experience as prior SaaS founder/operators and to leverage the expertise and network of Illuminate’s Business Advisory Council members. Illuminate participated in the financing alongside Altos Ventures, iNovia, and Beehive Capital and was offered a Board Observer role, despite being the smallest investor. Allocadia’s board makeup has essentially always been made up of 50% women.

We are so proud of the role that we’ve had the opportunity to play in collaborating with Kristine and Katherine, and the rest of the talented Allocadia team. In addition to ongoing advice and counsel, our Illuminate Business Advisory Council members made many customer and business partner introductions over the years. One of our advisors, Janice Chaffin, a prior CMO and later Group President of Symantec, served as a keynote speaker at Allocadia customer events and helped ensure that every seat in the room was filled with qualified prospects. Another Illuminate advisor made an introduction that resulted in a distribution partnership with a Fortune 100 company. Examples abound!

Allocadia today serves more than 10,500 marketers as users in companies that range from Autodesk and Juniper Networks to Land O’Lakes and Charles Schwab. Combined across all customers, more than $25 billion in marketing spend is managed within Allocadia. Along the way, the company set record levels of customer retention. With 120 talented employees and compelling unit economics, it’s no surprise that they received attention from multiple acquirers.

We are super excited for the future of the combined team of BrandMaker/Allocadia and know we’ll continue to collaborate over time. Our many ad hoc interactions and those lovely pre-board meeting dinners in Vancouver enabled us to build relationships that will last a lifetime. Thank you, Mark Organ, thank you, Anthony Lee, and especially thank you to all the Allocadians who worked so hard to build this successful company!

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